Amazon Prime gets a price hike; Google Drive gets a price cut

What do Amazon Prime and Google Drive have to do with each other? Not a whole lot—except that pricing changes were announced for both services today.

As Reuters reports, Amazon Prime is set to undergo a price hike next week. Yearly memberships will go from $79 to $99. That's not as bad as the $119 figure some had predicted, but it's still a 25% increase. And as far as I can tell, that rumored music streaming service isn't on the menu yet.

To be fair, though, Amazon has charged the same yearly fee since 2005. $79 in 2005 dollars works out to about $96 today, if you account for inflation. Add in rising fuel costs, and Amazon spokeswoman Julie Law says Prime would be worth "more than $100 today."

Google, meanwhile, has cut prices across all tiers of its Drive cloud storage and productivity service. The 100GB tier has gone down from $4.99 to $1.99 a month, and the 1TB tier has fallen from $99.99 to $49.99. I'm also seeing 10TB, 20TB, and 30TB tiers priced at a respective $99.99, $199.99, and $299.99 per month, but I can't tell if they existed before and, if so, how much of a price cut they've gotten. Google's blog post doesn't say, and my attempts to find a cached version of the tier list have failed.

Oh, and the free Drive service tier still gives you 15GB of space. Which is already quite generous—and more than what competitors like Dropbox and Microsoft's OneDrive offer.